


One Word

by Princ3squ3



Category: Original Work
Genre: F/F, Fantasy, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-09-12
Updated: 2020-09-12
Packaged: 2021-03-06 18:21:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 786
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26423278
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Princ3squ3/pseuds/Princ3squ3
Summary: Writing practice. Don't read it if you know me irl.One girl doesn't know how to die. Another makes an unusual friend.(The lesbians are both fine.)





	One Word

From her perch atop the world, the white child poked her head between ornate iron balustrades to peer down at her kingdom. Though the first light of dawn had only just begun to creep in, the view was etched into her memory. She tugged at the ivy that swallowed her balcony, yearning for the orderly garden below.

She remembered dashing through it, giggling, while her sister pursued. She remembered her mother, who was less than pleased when her daughter returned with an unnamed flower – root and all – clutched in her tiny hand.

The garden was beautiful and full of wonders, but from above it was nothing but rows of green and brown. Her ivy was green enough, and she’d never favored brown.

She tugged too hard, and the ivy tore away from the balustrade. For just a moment, fear of her mother’s scolding took hold, and she hurled the ivy to the ground below. If no one saw her with it, it couldn’t be her fault, right?

But just as soon as it had come, the fear was gone. She knew her mother would never scold her again. She’d never risk exposing herself to the sickness that had failed to take her daughter.

The girl sighed and tugged at another strand of ivy. The sudden disturbance sent a violet-gold butterfly fluttering, and the girl was enraptured. She grabbed at it, but it brushed past her hand and hovered just out of reach.

“Come back!” she cried.

“I don’t think I shall,” the butterfly whispered back. “Your grimy hands will ruin my wings.”

“I’ll be gentle, I promise!”

“Many a child has made a promise, and not a one was kept.”

The girl pouted, but the violet-gold butterfly wasn’t as easily manipulated as her sister.

“We have a question for you, child-human.”

The whisper-voice tickled her ear, and the girl clutched it, giggling.

“Why are you still here?”

The girl frowned. Of course she couldn’t leave her tower – the door was locked, and she didn’t have wings. The ivy was too weak to support her weight, and she wasn’t sure she could climb so far. She told the butterfly as much.

“No, child-human, why are you still _here_?”

The butterfly fluttered in circles above her head, wings shimmering in the first light of dawn. The girl leapt for it, but it was still out of her reach.

“Tell me why you have not been Collected. Why you have not passed to the other Side.”

The girl scrunched up her nose, rolling the butterfly’s words in her head. How could she be collected when she wasn’t a doll or a flower or a bug or any of the other number of items she liked to gather? People _couldn’t_ be collected, as far as she knew.

She rubbed at her hollow eyes. All this thinking was beginning to give her a headache.

“I suppose you must be familiar with only your own crude terminology. I will try again to explain. Why are you not yet dead?”

Oh. That was a question that made sense. The doctors and clerics and diviners and snake-men her parents had summoned had asked the same question too many times to count, and sometimes even to her directly. She hadn’t had an answer for them either.

“Perhaps you drank a strange liquid?” the butterfly pressed. “Or peered into the dark moon’s light and made a pact with the faerie queen? Or did you give a golden coin to a beggar – a trick of the gods all too common, and _inconvenient_.”

The butterfly gazed intently at the girl, though she couldn’t explain how she knew. She could feel its whisper-words hungering for answers. She shivered.

“I guess I just decided that I wouldn’t,” she finally said.

“You decided?”

“I promised to visit my sister in Luxmere when I’m bigger. We’re going to the sparkly lakes.”

She couldn’t stop the grin that spread across her face. Even babies knew about the sparkly fish that glowed in the dark and lit up the lakes at night, and even though it was ‘not permitted’ – as her mother often put it – swimming with her sister and the fish was her dream.

“A promise to your sister-human is not binding.” The butterfly dismissed the girl’s answer with an exaggerated flutter of its wings.

As the first true ray of light shot across the fields, the butterfly’s flutters became erratic.

“Our time is up, child-human. Expect to see me again.”

With a fizzling hiss, the violet-gold butterfly burst into glitter dust. The girl reached out again, determined to capture a sparkle, if not the butterfly itself, but the dust was captured by a sudden breeze and carried from her prison. She pouted.


End file.
